Web page design

I've done enough studying of web page design to wonder exactly what works best--Short pages with links to more short pages, long pages with bookmarks to sections of the page, white backgrounds or colored backgrounds, graphics or no graphics, on and on. While there are some universal truths, my feeling is that Web page design is an art form, and depending on what one's purpose is, some rules are meant to be broken.

That said, though, one of Ko and Rossen's guidelines for web pages (p. 139-140) interests me, that being the recommendation that text not stretch "completely across the page." Reading this, I realize I've seen this recommendation before, but I've never really thought about it when creating my own pages. Is it because we're accustomed to reading text from books that contain page margins? Is it a product of the way our eyes scan a page (or screen) for reading?

Using tables to arrange the objects on web pages is great advice as it's the only way to get objects to stay where they belong on different computers and in different browsers. Lynch and Horton at http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/graphics/multimedia/front/preface-2.html provide a whole series of recommendations for web page design, including the recommendation to create a template for the pages of the site, so the layout doesn't have to continuously be recreated. I suppose the principle of blank space could be taken care of with a three column table with the outer columns being the white space. I'm anxious to try this out on my next web page.